Washington, DC -- As a follow-up to last week's post about the Random Hacks of Kindness event, we'd like to announce the winners and runners up.

Judges representing each of the sponsors (Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, NASA, and the World Bank) critiqued the teams' applications on various parameters including level of innovation, its potential for speedy application in the market, and the size of its impact in the world.

The three runners up teams were called SMS Help (a platform which allows a set of services to be provided through the use of SMS only), 311 to 911 (an expansion of functionality on last year's I'MOK! app), and Person Finder Project (locating people after disaster strikes).

CHASM was deemed the most innovative and highly applicable with the greatest potential impact. Providing access to landslide prediction software for risk reduction, CHASM takes a years' long University of Bristol (UK) project and makes it applicable in the world. Two of the team members, a professor and a post-doc, had spent years developing a model for predicting landslide risk based on certain characteristics like soil type, slope geometry, and water table levels, but had not been successful in building an interface accessible to people in the field. At RHoK, they were teamed up with 8 others who helped them do just that.

The CHASM team receives airfare to the next RHoK event as well as the guidance of the University of Bristol to put the new tool to work. It is set to be tested in Jamaica in July where landslides affect a large poor population who've built shantytowns on the hillsides.